Formerly ScreenwriterGuy

By day I'm a user experience designer. By not-day, I head the collective of talented writers, actors, and video artists who publish sketch comedy at brevityTV.com.

My Nemeses

Jane Austen
Internet Explorer 6
Celine Dione
The TSA

Less Time Necessitates More Time Management

So many transitions this year. Got married, for one. Plus, after a couple of years as a freelancer putting together this gig and that, I now have a desk I’m supposed to be at, Mondays through Fridays. Naturally, both of these have a huge impact on the time I can spend with BrevityTV and my own writing in general.

But student-athletes get better grades than non-athletes, even though they have more to do, and it’s because their situation forces time management. I’ve been doing more words-to-page lately, despite having less time. So far, so good. Getting productive results out of your writing time means more when it will be the only couple of hours you get that week. Here’s what I want to remind myself to keep in mind in 2013 and beyond.

Delegate: Awesome people have stepped into roles that I filled previously, a necessary part of growing any group. You’re not passing off responsibility; you’re enabling others to grow.

Compensate: Time used to be more readily available than money. That’s reversed. So sometimes I allow myself to pay someone else to design or program something I would previously have done myself. Probably get better results that way, anyway.

Consolidate: We closed down Beyond.brevitytv and WeWriteFunny. I want to devote resources to efforts that will yield results, and remove the rest from my to-do list.

Recreate: Yet I’ve also increased the amount of leisure time I’m allowed. One is more productive after a rest, turns out.

Self-Exculpate: OK, the word is a stretch, but here’s the deal… I used to hold myself responsible for keeping up with every relevant TV show, every blog post on digital media, every tweet from people in my industry. But in 2012 there’s a fire hose of pertinent content blasting at us all. No one can keep up. There’s always something else to read, watch, or learn. If you feel guilt when you don’t stay on top of it all, you lose. So now, when every couple of weeks when I declare my entire RSS feed read, even though it’s not, or I do the same thing with Twitter, daily, or if I fall a few episodes behind in a TV show… I forgive myself. I process as much as I can, and don’t sweat the rest, because that’s all you can do.